'Tis the Season to be Worried?

I'm never sure about capitals in titles. Should all the words be capitalised? Or only the long ones? Hmm, it's a pickle.

Well I'm back at the family home for Christmas, having left London after an early morning phone call from my mother (well, 9.30 - I'm a student, ok?) telling me that heavy snow was on the way, and to get a train quick before they were all cancelled. I duly did, and though the snow was thick by the time I got to Paddington, and all of the trains were at least delayed, the journey was notable for it being uneventful, except for reminding me of the Philip Larkin poem The Whitsun Weddings:

'That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not 'til about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone'

That, and the classic Night Mail poem by W.H. Auden,

The view was like this for most of the journey, once I got out of London where the clouds still threw down snow like a pillow shedding goose feathers:

Rather lovely really.

Now I am back however, the snow is making everything difficult except those things one can do without leaving the house. Unfortunately the deadline for internet buying is over, and despite spending seven hours at Westfield shopping centre this week (all at once, I might add), I have only bought half of my Christmas presents. I suppose that's what comes of having a big family.

Those presents I have bought, I have begun wrapping. Having done three of them, I am now thoroughly fed up of it. This is unusual for me - I generally love wrapping - but this year I wrote and helped put on a show set in Father Christmas's factory, and this involved a set of cardboard boxes wrapped as presents. Many cardboard boxes. I would guess that the three of us on the production team wrapped perhaps a hundred each. In May. I cannot stress enough how hard it is to find Christmas wrapping paper in May. I won't tell the long and boring story of the show, but suffice to say we now realise how difficult it is to put a Christmas show on in May. This is the stage - it may not look like many boxes, but it felt like a lot:

Indeed this picture hardly does it justice, our houses were swamped by boxes. The boot of my car was full to the brim with cardboard boxes wrapped in Christmas paper, which I'm sure confused the mechanics when I had my MOT... These are just some of the ones I wrapped:

Anyway, I seem to have digressed. My real subject for this post is, as you may have already guessed, Christmas. In case you hadn't noticed, it's quite soon. And getting closer every second. This will be my twenty third Christmas, and for the first time I have discovered something strange and untoward. Christmas is not just a time for family, presents, food and all that jazz; it is a time of worry. I have been feeling gradually more festive every day this week, and being at my parents' house, with a tree and lights and food and the promise of all the usual excitement has condensed this feeling into sudden bursts of delight at the thought. And yet, I have found myself frowning and tensing, and it dawned on me that I am worried. Christmas is a big deal in our house - any attempts by anyone to scale it down a little have been thwarted by something, some magic in the air that means the cupboards are always full to overflowing and more food and drink and presents are brought in by every visitor. And I love it. Mostly. But here I have found the reason people get snappy and stressed, and I know I feel it too. I am worried about all the tiny things that don't really matter, but that add up into something easy to worry about, such as 'Will they like my presents?' 'Can I afford this?' 'Did I get them enough?' and even 'Is this wrapping straight?'. These are, I know, unimportant (except for perhaps the second one, to which the answer is 'not really') but at this time of year panic gives another flavour to the air, and these slight anxieties distill to become more than the sum of their parts. The other worry is, of course, the knowledge that after the age of ten or so, Christmas day is actually an anti-climax. It is fun, great fun, but never how you imagine it, and always over much more quickly than you remember.

Still, I do know that, despite my worries, I will have a lovely time as ever, and by this time next week it will be over - worries and all. Then it's only the several thousand words of essays to be handed in in January...